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Peggy to her Playwrights: The Letters of Margaret Ramsay, Play Agent
Peggy Ramsay (1908-1991) was the foremost play agent of her time. Her list of clients shows her to have been at the centre of British playwriting for several generations from the late 1950s on.
To her remarkable array of clients, her letter writing was notorious, marked by searing candour, both a wondrous motivation and an unforgiving scrutiny to be feared.
'Peggy judged by the most exalted standards and lashed her writers when they failed to meet them. Her force of personality made her well-nigh irresistible. The letters she wrote to her writers and to producers are extraordinary documents, filled with all these qualities, and indiscreet, blasphemous and saucy to boot.' – Simon Callow
To her remarkable array of clients, her letter writing was notorious, marked by searing candour, both a wondrous motivation and an unforgiving scrutiny to be feared.
'Peggy judged by the most exalted standards and lashed her writers when they failed to meet them. Her force of personality made her well-nigh irresistible. The letters she wrote to her writers and to producers are extraordinary documents, filled with all these qualities, and indiscreet, blasphemous and saucy to boot.' – Simon Callow
214 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 28, 2024
This is an excellent and enjoyable read, evidently vital stuff for anyone with the slightest interest in immersing themselves in British theatrical culture from the 1950s to 1980s. Ramsay's vying tones - emotionally baroque and austerely astringent - make this book's appearance on a certain bookshelf in Rose Glass's recent British horror film Saint Maud (2019) seem the inspired piece of set dressing it is.
I find Ramsay's insights and feelings about drama, the purpose of writing, and her advocacy of talent and work over success and status highly persuasive. She has an awareness that writers and spectators are best when they have feelings about the characters they are witnessing. Plays should not merely be a weekend diversion, but should affect how you feel about life, and how to live it, sometimes imparting profound secrets.
While these words can apply fairly well to cinema and television, it is very clear that Ramsay does not seem as interested in those mediums as in theatre or literature, though clearly most of her clients whose correspondence is included here did notably screen work, especially single TV plays. Her tart dismissal of John Hopkins seems a veiled dig at the domestic 'enclosed room' nature of certain TV dramas. Interestingly, nor does she seem to admire client Robert Bolt's lucrative and even OSCAR winning stabs at film screenplays, feeling that these expansive spectacular epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) are also taking Bolt away from the intense and direct human communication of theatre.
This book of collected letters from a renowned theatrical agent contains an honest waspishness that reveals much about the temper of the times it documents. She doesn't often pronounce directly on politics, but when she does, there is an utter steadfast morality in the way she urges Alan Ayckbourn and Donald Howarth to do the right thing and join John Mortimer, Peter Nichols, Alan Plater et al in a cultural boycott of Apartheid South Africa by not permitting productions of their plays there.
Colin Chambers does an excellent job in selecting telling and entertaining letters, though given the richness of the archive in the British Library, a scholar like myself wishes this had been at least 300 pages, to incorporate even more. Nonetheless, it's apt that key figures such as Ayckbourn, Hare, Orton and Bolt do constitute the book's mainstay. Simon Callow's foreword is exceptionally controlled: distilling the essence of Ramsay's extraordinary cultural contribution. Implicitly, when reading, we feel the cavernous sense of cultural loss and the closing down of challenging voices and imaginative possibilities that have arisen with Thatcherite philistinism and the linked Blairite view of the Cultural Industries as primarily businesses. Not that Ramsay is not attentive to the financial imperatives for writers, but she realises that material comfort is often a byproduct which comes later, and is far less important than how art changes our minds and helps us understand life.
As notably, Margaret Ramsay's high standards in her judgement of scripts that clients send her are grounded in her immersion in the European naturalist and modernist canon - Beckett, Gide, Genet, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg - and expressed through her absolute commitment to talented playwrights with distinctive, unique voices.
I find Ramsay's insights and feelings about drama, the purpose of writing, and her advocacy of talent and work over success and status highly persuasive. She has an awareness that writers and spectators are best when they have feelings about the characters they are witnessing. Plays should not merely be a weekend diversion, but should affect how you feel about life, and how to live it, sometimes imparting profound secrets.
While these words can apply fairly well to cinema and television, it is very clear that Ramsay does not seem as interested in those mediums as in theatre or literature, though clearly most of her clients whose correspondence is included here did notably screen work, especially single TV plays. Her tart dismissal of John Hopkins seems a veiled dig at the domestic 'enclosed room' nature of certain TV dramas. Interestingly, nor does she seem to admire client Robert Bolt's lucrative and even OSCAR winning stabs at film screenplays, feeling that these expansive spectacular epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) are also taking Bolt away from the intense and direct human communication of theatre.
This book of collected letters from a renowned theatrical agent contains an honest waspishness that reveals much about the temper of the times it documents. She doesn't often pronounce directly on politics, but when she does, there is an utter steadfast morality in the way she urges Alan Ayckbourn and Donald Howarth to do the right thing and join John Mortimer, Peter Nichols, Alan Plater et al in a cultural boycott of Apartheid South Africa by not permitting productions of their plays there.
Colin Chambers does an excellent job in selecting telling and entertaining letters, though given the richness of the archive in the British Library, a scholar like myself wishes this had been at least 300 pages, to incorporate even more. Nonetheless, it's apt that key figures such as Ayckbourn, Hare, Orton and Bolt do constitute the book's mainstay. Simon Callow's foreword is exceptionally controlled: distilling the essence of Ramsay's extraordinary cultural contribution. Implicitly, when reading, we feel the cavernous sense of cultural loss and the closing down of challenging voices and imaginative possibilities that have arisen with Thatcherite philistinism and the linked Blairite view of the Cultural Industries as primarily businesses. Not that Ramsay is not attentive to the financial imperatives for writers, but she realises that material comfort is often a byproduct which comes later, and is far less important than how art changes our minds and helps us understand life.
As notably, Margaret Ramsay's high standards in her judgement of scripts that clients send her are grounded in her immersion in the European naturalist and modernist canon - Beckett, Gide, Genet, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg - and expressed through her absolute commitment to talented playwrights with distinctive, unique voices.
July 23, 2018
"The really interesting thing about the history of any play, is the astonishing remarks and rejections which it receives before it goes on. The only plays which get unanimous praise and which get on with the greatest ease, are those that sink like stones."
‘Peggy to her Playwrights’ is a fascinating read and her letters reveal a passionately intelligent but forthright individual who could be both fiercely critical of her writers and protective of them.
In the section covering the letters she wrote to Alan Ayckbourn (the book is arranged alphabetically with whom she corresponded) she doesn’t hold back from giving her opinion when he is approached on more than one occasion to let his plays be staged there having spent much of her early years in South Africa.
There’s a fairly lengthy selection of some of the letters she sent to Robert Bolt whose success with plays such as ‘A Man for all Seasons’ and screenplays like ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ greatly helped to put Ramsay’s agency at the forefront of British writing talent management.
What comes across in a few of her letters to Bolt is that she sees success as an enemy to future productive work and urges him not to rest on his laurels even after having won two Oscars but to remember and use how it felt when he was struggling early on in his writing career.
Although she could be pretty forthright in her opinions about what worked or didn’t in a client’s play with her sharp intelligence and knowledge she was more often than not correct in her assessment. That said her letters are often by turns playfully mischievous, wilfully provocative and laugh out loud in many places.
She would often pepper her correspondence with erudite quotes from such figures as Baudelaire. She was however also fiercely defensive of her writers and writing and lamented the transition from the power of an author’s name to attract an audience to a stars.
What ultimately is conveyed from her letters is that a kind of ruthlessness is required from playwrights, she seems to suggest, in being prepared to sacrifice family life and responsibilities to a large extent if someone wants to be a renowned and long remembered writer and not just a soon forgotten jobbing one.
‘Peggy to her Playwrights’ is a fascinating read and her letters reveal a passionately intelligent but forthright individual who could be both fiercely critical of her writers and protective of them.
In the section covering the letters she wrote to Alan Ayckbourn (the book is arranged alphabetically with whom she corresponded) she doesn’t hold back from giving her opinion when he is approached on more than one occasion to let his plays be staged there having spent much of her early years in South Africa.
There’s a fairly lengthy selection of some of the letters she sent to Robert Bolt whose success with plays such as ‘A Man for all Seasons’ and screenplays like ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ greatly helped to put Ramsay’s agency at the forefront of British writing talent management.
What comes across in a few of her letters to Bolt is that she sees success as an enemy to future productive work and urges him not to rest on his laurels even after having won two Oscars but to remember and use how it felt when he was struggling early on in his writing career.
Although she could be pretty forthright in her opinions about what worked or didn’t in a client’s play with her sharp intelligence and knowledge she was more often than not correct in her assessment. That said her letters are often by turns playfully mischievous, wilfully provocative and laugh out loud in many places.
She would often pepper her correspondence with erudite quotes from such figures as Baudelaire. She was however also fiercely defensive of her writers and writing and lamented the transition from the power of an author’s name to attract an audience to a stars.
What ultimately is conveyed from her letters is that a kind of ruthlessness is required from playwrights, she seems to suggest, in being prepared to sacrifice family life and responsibilities to a large extent if someone wants to be a renowned and long remembered writer and not just a soon forgotten jobbing one.
October 12, 2023
I saw her mentioned in a biography of Robert Bolt.She seemed interesting so I thought I would read her biography.However this is more about her playwrights than her.
What might have been endearingly eccentric early on became tiresome and bizarre after some way through.Not a book I will remember fondly.
What might have been endearingly eccentric early on became tiresome and bizarre after some way through.Not a book I will remember fondly.
July 28, 2022
Letters of an amazing women
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews